Chapter 1: i don't really care about anybody else when i haven't got my own life figured out
Chapter Text
The coffee shop is really, truly, insufferably pretentious. It’s the sort of place that people go to make themselves miserable on purpose—they know the baristas will judge their drink orders, and there’s a draft that blows cold air through the entire east hemisphere of the shop, and the heating is so noisy that you can barely hear yourself think, and the outlets only work if you force in your plug upside down and say a prayer to the gods of technology and procrastination. It’s always dimly lit and there are no posted hours, nor is there any form of open/closed sign, not unless you count the neon “COFFEE” sign over the bar. All of these little inconveniences make the shop the perfect sort of pleasantly annoying to attract disaffected hipsters and bored students, which means that it’s impeccably located, near as it is to the university.
Maybe the best way to describe it is ridiculously pretentious, then. And Nick loves it, right down to the bottoms of the armchair legs with the missing felt feet that make terrible screeching sounds when people drag them across the floor. Though his dream in life hadn’t exactly been to work in a crappy coffee shop/hipster mecca, after he failed out of uni, he hadn’t been left with a lot of options. He’d told his father that a business degree wasn’t for him, but the answer had come back ‘Business or I’m not paying’, which made the choice fairly straightforward. Nick had spent all his free time hosting shows on the student radio station—and then his studying time went to listening to music, and his class time went to simply hanging round and annoying the other DJs, nearly all of whom were his friends. While he’d never been very good at business, Nick spent two years cramming right around exam time and barely scraping through; he might have managed his degree if he’d remembered the work placement requirement.
It had all turned out fine, though. All right, well, maybe his father’s reaction wasn’t especially fine, nor was being stuck in his uni town because he couldn’t afford to move to London and refused to get a proper job until he did, the combination of which made things a bit difficult. There was also the fact that Nick was complete crap at managing money. All told, Nick currently had about 20 pound to his name, and that much only because he’d been paid yesterday.
But it was fine. Everything was going according to plan.
In fact, Nick’s idly daydreaming about The Plan (save up, move to London, work as a DJ, get rich and famous) and pretending to straighten up when he hears the doorbell ring. It’s an actual, literal bell on the door, and Nick is perennially half-surprised that none of the regulars have taken it down yet, what with the disgusted glares they all make every time it chimes (but then, he’s half completely unsurprised, too; hipsters are happiest when they have something to complain about, which Nick knows well because he is one). The kid that accompanies the doorbell…well, he looks altogether too pleased by his new surroundings, and Nick dislikes him at once. He’s beaming at the dubiously flickering light fixtures, the non-level tables, the noisy heating and the pretentious music that it almost covers up but not quite. In fact he seems so earnestly caught up in feasting on the shop with his senses that he’s forgotten to close the door, and Nick is quite happy to make breaking that spell into a part of his job.
“Oi, mate, mind taking a couple of steps in or out? There’ll be a snowdrift in here soon at this rate,” says Nick with a poorly-concealed sneer. The kid either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about his attitude, though. He startles when Nick speaks, and offers an “Oh, sorry.” His accent is warm, Northern, and familiar-sounding, and his voice is like syrup—slow and thick and comforting. Nick shuts down that train of thought right quickly. The kid is still grinning, after all, every bit as brightly as before, and Nick decides that he’s going to have to try harder—they can’t have earnest, happy people in here; it’s bad for business.
“Cheers,” says Nick sardonically. “What’ll it be, then?” He’s pretty sure that this kid is the sort to take a shine to people, to get it in his head that he likes you and then stick to you like glue, and maybe if Nick is brusque and professional (for once), the kid will get the idea and fuck off back wherever he came from, subpar coffee in tow. If he even orders coffee—Nick would not be surprised if the kid ordered something unbelievably twee like hot chocolate and then stuck around to lean on the counter and bat his eyelashes at him and ask probing questions about his life. Not that he’s looking at the kid’s eyelashes. Fuck.
“Hmmmm…” Nick is pretty sure that sound should only be two seconds long, three at a stretch, but he’s equally sure that this kid has managed to stretch out saying it for a good fifteen. Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration (Nick is prone to those, Finchy’s always saying), but Nick can’t be blamed for it—he’s too busy being hypnotized by Earnest McDimples and his Stupidly Slow Voice. The kid pulls a hand out of his pocket (no gloves, just fingers that look as long as his vowel sounds) and proceeds to use his thumb and first finger to play with his bottom lip in the most sexual-looking “thinking face” that Nick has ever had the misfortune to see. He adamantly refuses to stare, reminding himself that he doesn’t like this kid, just on principle.
“What’s good?” the kid asks. It’s a normal thing to ask, but it’s also an opportunity, and Nick never could pass up a chance to play the clown, so he doesn’t. He’ll go back to being disapproving and unfriendly in a minute.
“Honestly?” Nick asks. The question is obviously rhetorical, and he barely pauses long enough for the kid to nod before he adds, “None of it. That’s the point. The coffee’s shit, which gives you something to complain about. And everybody likes complaining, so they keep coming back.” The kid chuckles, which brings back the grin and the dimples, as well as Nick’s sense of superiority. Good, he’d been wondering where that had gone.
“Why does your nametag say ‘Grimey’?” the kid wonders aloud, and Nick blinks owlishly at him, slightly thrown by the abrupt change in conversation. As if it were necessary, the kid extends a long finger to point vaguely in the direction of Nick’s nametag. He glances down at it, a bemused expression on his face. He’d sort of forgotten about it, really. Sure, all the baristas had them, but they were ironic. None of them said their real names. He’d made most of them, but LMC had done his, an inside joke based on the way that Siri had spectacularly fucked up his nickname on a slow afternoon when they were trying to pry the secrets of the universe out of her.
Nick can’t let this too-earnest kid with his slow voice and weird questions shut him up for too long, though. “What if I told you that was my real name?” Nick asks, leaning on his elbows on the counter. He’s forgotten that he’s supposed to be being mean to the kid; the banter is too natural and he slips into it almost unconsciously.
The kid raises an eyebrow at him. “Then I’d say you had parents with shit taste.” Nick is surprised by the bluntness of the joke, amused despite himself, and he raises both of his eyebrows and straightens up, crossing his arms over his chest. He puts on his very best mock-offended face. “How very dare you! I’ll have you know, my mum’s lace doilies are very tasteful. Proper fashion-forward.”
The smirk the kid gives him in return is answer enough, even before he speaks, and Nick wonders where the earnest grin went. If he looks close enough, it’s there beneath the twist of his lips, but he gets distracted when those lips open to deliver a comeback. “If that’s true, then I don’t believe she’d name you Grimey. I mean, surely you weren’t born a filthy hipster…”
Nick lets out an offended little huff at that and fails miserably at trying not to enjoy this. He pulls himself up to his full height and fights down the smile threatening to ruin his disapproving look as he says “If I tell you my name, will you order something and move along? You’re holding up the queue.” He gestures vaguely over the kid’s shoulder.
Clearly, the kid was raised with some manners (if the slightly posh way he spoke wasn’t enough of a giveaway), because he quickly glances behind him, clearly ready to apologize…except that the queue he’s supposedly holding up is non-existent. He turns back around and gives Nick a glare with absolutely no heat in it before falling back into the banter. “Yeah, yeah, all right then, let’s move this along…”
And he pauses, clearly waiting for Nick to fill in his name. “Nick,” he supplies, and the kid repeats it: “Nick.” It sounds different coming from his mouth, even though Nick knows that their accents are similar. “I’m Harry, by the way”, the kid offers, and Nick shrugs, clearly saying ‘I didn’t ask’ and ‘Hello there, Harry’ at the same time.
It’s a ridiculously common name, and anyway they don’t do the stupid writing on cups thing, but when he gives Harry his coffee (plain and black, Harry says, because if it’s going to be shit anyway then why pay more? Nick encourages this order mostly because it’s the easiest thing on the menu for him to make), but that doesn’t stop Nick from finding a biro in the register and scribbling ‘Hairy’ on his cup before handing it to him. The kid—Harry—looks up at him with a hint of a pout about his features and says “Heeeeeeeyyyy,” dragging that one syllable into twelve extra ones. It’s then that Nick realises that contrary to old Swifty, he didn’t know that the kid was trouble when he walked in. Now he does, though. Mostly because the kid made him think of a Taylor Swift song, which he hates himself for knowing, just a little bit.
Chapter 2: you see you've got this thing with walking, and me, i've got this thing about you.
Chapter Text
In retrospect, Nick is pretty sure that his assumption about Harry taking a shine to people and then gluing himself to their sides must have been wrong. It’s been almost a week and he hasn’t been back to the coffee shop, at least not while Nick was working. Nick won’t admit that he’s been looking for curly hair and dimples out of the corner of his eye since the day he wandered in—nor will he consider the possibility that he was right about Harry and he’s just not fond of Nick like Nick thought he was.
It’s not like Nick cares anyway.
He cares so little by Friday afternoon that he’s sitting on the counter, playing Temple Run 2 on his phone, and not even pretending to pay attention to the customers until they come up and clear their throats. It is keeping him from glancing up at the doorway and feeling a little punch of disappointment in his gut at the sight of another somebody with a buzz cut and a scowl, but it’s not doing much for the tips jar. In fact, Nick’s so engrossed in tilting his phone around to steer his cart that he doesn’t even see Harry until he hears “Working hard, Nick?” in that unmistakeable accent.
Nick jumps; he loses control and his little person goes careening off the tracks. He’s left the sound up, so everyone can hear a quiet little “Aaaah!” (which is eerily similar to the sound Nick’s heart is making right now), and Harry laughs, as does the bloke next to him. Nick composes himself quickly, though, and turns his phone around to show it to Harry. “You made me lose,” he says with a frown that’s verging on petulant.
The bloke who’s with Harry hooks his chin over Harry’s shoulder and squints at Nick’s screen. “Mate, if you’re going to play Temple Run at work, you ought to at least be good at it,” he says, which strikes Nick as rather rude for someone he’s never met. He gives the boy a once-over: he’s shorter than Harry, with artfully messy hair and a smirk on his face that Nick would bet is permanent. Going by his body language around Harry (familiar, protective), Nick would give pretty good odds that this is his boyfriend. Or possibly Nick’s projecting; it’s difficult to say. Regardless, Nick doesn’t like him—likes him even less than he likes Harry, which he assures himself is really saying something.
“Excuse me, four million is a perfectly respectable score, especially since I was interrupted,” says Nick haughtily, yanking his phone away from the two of them. The bloke shrugs and says simply, “You could do better,” glancing at Harry out of the corner of his eye.
Nick gets the distinct sense that they’re not talking about Temple Run any more.
Apparently, so does Harry, because the two of them have what looks like a brief, frenzied conversation using only their eyes and eyebrows. Nick feels like a third wheel, so he closes the app and flicks his thumb across his phone, going from one page of apps to the next and back again, not actually doing anything except giving the appearance of being busy. This time, Nick’s ready when Harry clears his throat, and instead of nearly dropping his phone, he merely raises his eyes slowly to look at the two boys. Much cooler, that way.
“Um, Nick, this is Louis. He’s my housemate, a—” “And his best mate,” Louis interrupts, “and since Harry came here last week he hasn’t been able to shut up about how good the coffee was, so I wanted to come in and try it myself.”
Nick met Harry for ten minutes a week ago, but that was enough for him to be able to tell that that was a considerably smoother lie than whatever Harry was going to say. Unfortunately for Louis, while his delivery was top-notch, he’s obviously never tried the coffee here, and Harry has, and Nick knows it, because they talked about how shite it was. Nick raises an eyebrow at Harry, who is determinedly looking anywhere but at him. This little turn of events has improved Nick’s mood considerably, and he grins at Louis and pushes himself off the counter. “Good on Harry for being a walking salesman for us. If you bring in three more you’ll get a misspelled nickname badge of your very own.” Harry and Louis chuckle, but Nick doesn’t get the joke, so he barrels on. “What’ll it be, Louis?”
Louis, who is clearly some kind of sadist, orders a medium soy caramel latte with no foam, but with two and a half packets of sweetener, served in a large cup, with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles. The girl with a triangle shaved into her hair sitting near the counter turns around to glare at him, and her glare is nothing compared to the half-furious, half-incredulous look on Nick’s face, but Louis is impervious to both of them and merely smiles sweetly. Harry looks aghast.
It takes Nick about ten minutes to make the drink, considering that on an average day the most complicated thing anybody dares risk their street cred to order is a soy latte, which means that this is his sixth month working at a coffee shop without learning to be good at making coffee. He seriously considers spitting in the finished product, but decides that the possibly-expired milk and definitely-expired caramel syrup will have the same effect, if the coffee alone doesn’t do it. Nick hands it over with his best imitation of a perky barista grin.
Louis gives it a moment to cool down, but when he takes a sip, he chokes. Nick’s grin gets decidedly more evil, and Harry seems to be hiding his own in his scarf (Nick is disappointed; the scarf is concealing his dimples and that’s just not on). “Christ on a bike, why is this place still open?” Louis mutters not-very-quietly, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “The high-class atmosphere and charming staff, of course,” Nick shoots back. Louis sighs and rolls his eyes at Harry.
Nick is pretty sure that in whatever made-up language Harry and Louis use to communicate, that eyeroll had quite a bit more meaning than simple exasperation, because immediately afterwards, Harry steps up with a bright smile to order his own drink (“Is your tea any better?” “Worse if anything, mate.” “Well, best stick with black coffee, then.”), and he slips Nick his number written on a post-it stuck to his five-pound note. Nick pretends not to notice as he gives Harry his change, but he does write his own number on Harry’s cup. Louis rolls his eyes again when he notices it on their way out the door, but Nick couldn’t care less.
What he is a bit concerned about, though, is how that sequence of events transpired. He frowns to himself as he turns around and puts Harry’s number into his phone. Nick’s barely said a hundred words to this kid, knows nothing about him—for all Nick knows he could be underage or something, he definitely looks it—and here’s Nick handing out his phone number like it’s nothing? What if Harry turns out to be a psycho, or worse, utterly dull once you get past the dimples?
His phone chirps at him, because he’s left the sound up from his game of Temple Run, and Nick clicks the screen on immediately. Harry’s sent him an emoji of a phone crossed out and the words ‘Do your job x’. Nick stares at the screen for a second, and then a hand on his shoulder makes him jump. “Whoever ‘Hairy’ is, he’s got good advice—unless you’re receiving texts from your own chest, Nicholas, in which case you ought to seek help,” says Matt in his ear.
Nick clicks his phone off immediately, shoves it in his pocket, and turns around to pull a face at Matt. Though he is the assistant manager and therefore technically Nick’s superior or something, Matt and Nick have been unlikely sort of mates since they started working together and Nick has no qualms about mouthing off to him. “Yes, Finchy, I ought to hop to serving all of the thousands of customers who have so impatiently queued around the block!” Honestly, who is Finchy to turn up all ten minutes early to help Nick with the evening shift and start bossing him around?
By way of a response, Matt just points at the till, and there is in fact a girl waiting to order. Damn. Perhaps Nick ought to have glanced over there first. Matt smirks, and Nick gives a very exaggerated sigh as he goes over to help her. It’d be fine if that were the end of it, but Nick knows Matt better than that; he’s sure that Matt’s going to ask him who he was texting later, and then be all ‘I’m interested in your life, sue me for being a good friend’ until Nick tells him, and then he’ll text Ian and Fiona and LMC about it, and Nick will literally never, ever hear the end of it.
As he makes the girl’s latte, he’s pretty sure he can feel the sword of Damocles hanging over his easily-wounded ego. Or maybe he’s just being dramatic again. It’s hard to say, really.
goldenyears on Chapter 1 Tue 21 May 2013 08:05AM UTC
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orphan_account on Chapter 1 Sat 25 May 2013 11:53AM UTC
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goldenyears on Chapter 2 Sun 26 May 2013 06:49AM UTC
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orphan_account on Chapter 2 Wed 29 May 2013 07:55AM UTC
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Kathy100 on Chapter 2 Thu 16 Jun 2016 01:40AM UTC
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